Overview
- The Senate Commerce Committee began marking up a five-bill package this week that includes the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Chatbot Act, and a bill on AI toys.
- The SCREEN Act would require services to verify ages for any site that hosts even a single piece of sexually explicit content and would force checks tied to IP addresses with special rules for known VPN traffic, which critics say undermines anonymity.
- KOSA keeps a statutory "duty of care" for platforms to mitigate harms to minors, and critics warn that enforcing that duty will push companies to identify users’ ages and remove or block lawful speech to avoid liability.
- The Youth AI Privacy Act would impose kids-only limits on chatbot features and data use, but privacy groups say that narrow protection creates a ‘‘privacy paradox’’ by incentivizing platforms to gather more age data rather than extend protections to all users.
- Civil-liberties groups, security experts, and some industry voices argue the bills would expand retention of sensitive identity data, raise First Amendment and breach risks, and face legal challenges similar to state-level age-design laws that federal courts have blocked.